| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: For I am hers who loves not any man
Whose white and stainless bosom bears the sign Gorgonian.
Let Venus go and chuck her dainty page,
And kiss his mouth, and toss his curly hair,
With net and spear and hunting equipage
Let young Adonis to his tryst repair,
But me her fond and subtle-fashioned spell
Delights no more, though I could win her dearest citadel.
Ay, though I were that laughing shepherd boy
Who from Mount Ida saw the little cloud
Pass over Tenedos and lofty Troy
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery: to get back to dry land."
The flat drifted under the bridge and then promptly sank in
midstream. Ruby, Jane, and Diana, already awaiting it on the
lower headland, saw it disappear before their very eyes and had
not a doubt but that Anne had gone down with it. For a moment
they stood still, white as sheets, frozen with horror at the
tragedy; then, shrieking at the tops of their voices, they
started on a frantic run up through the woods, never pausing as
they crossed the main road to glance the way of the bridge.
Anne, clinging desperately to her precarious foothold, saw their
flying forms and heard their shrieks. Help would soon come, but
Anne of Green Gables |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: ancient from the modern mode of conceiving God.
a. To Plato, the idea of God or mind is both personal and impersonal. Nor
in ascribing, as appears to us, both these attributes to him, and in
speaking of God both in the masculine and neuter gender, did he seem to
himself inconsistent. For the difference between the personal and
impersonal was not marked to him as to ourselves. We make a fundamental
distinction between a thing and a person, while to Plato, by the help of
various intermediate abstractions, such as end, good, cause, they appear
almost to meet in one, or to be two aspects of the same. Hence, without
any reconciliation or even remark, in the Republic he speaks at one time of
God or Gods, and at another time of the Good. So in the Phaedrus he seems
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: dead pines fallen from above. Running was impossible. I clambered upward
over the loose stones, under the bridges of pines, round the boulders.
Presently I heard a shout. I could not tell where it came from, but I
replied. A second call I identified as coming from high up the ragged
canyon side, and I started up. It was hard work. Certainly no bears or
hunter had climbed out just here. At length, sore, spent, and torn, I fell
out of a tangle of brush upon the edge of the canyon. Above me rose the
swelling mountain slope thickly covered with dwarf pines.
"This way, youngster!" called the old hunter from my left.
A few more dashes in and out of the brush and trees brought me to a fairly
open space with not much slope. Hiram Bent stood under a pine, and at his
The Young Forester |
